Originally from the Navajo Nation, Raven Chacon is a composer of chamber music, a performer of experimental noise music, and an installation artist. He performs regularly as a solo artist as well as with numerous ensembles in the Southwest and beyond. He is also a member of the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity, with who he recently premiered the 2-mile long land art/border intervention, Repellent Fence.

Just one week after the election results in the United States, I had the honor to sit down with composer and artist Raven Chacon and talk about his practice. In this episode Raven speaks about the origins of his work and how he came to experience making sound. We hear about his involvement with Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist and we also hear about his work teaching youth through the Native American Composer Apprentice Project. Raven shares his varying experiences in creating chamber music and experimental noise and reflects on the ‘dues' that must be paid by artists along the way. He also addresses ideas around identity and the Indigenous artist, what the role of the artist is, and the opportunity the artist has to remain mysterious. Raven reminds us to think critically and to take time to seek the truth.

More about Raven Chacon: http://spiderwebsinthesky.com/
Blog link: http://www.brokenboxespodcast.com/podcast/2016/12/3/episode-56-interview-with-raven-chacon

Image: Repellant Fence. Postcommodity. http://postcommodity.com/Repellent_Fence

Episode 56

Interview with composer and artist Raven Chacon. Episode 56

In this episode we get into conversation with Portland based multi-disciplinary artist, educator and community organizer Sharita Towne. 

Music featured on this podcast by Brown Calculus

More about the artist:

As an artist, Sharita Towne’s interests lie in unpacking the inherited struggles of past burdens and in affording collective catharsis. Through collaboration, stereo-photography, printmaking, video, and community art projects, she’s worked at memorials in Germany; in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria; Brazil; in gentrifying cities like Portland, Oregon and New Orleans; in schools, museums, and neighborhoods, and within her own family. She received a BFA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Portland State University. She currently teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art, works in the DIY printmaking and audiovisual collective URe:AD Press (United Re:Public of the African Diaspora), the post-colonial conceptual karaoke band Weird Allan Kaprow, and is a 2016 Art Matters grant recipient.

Interview with Sharita Towne. Episode 72

In this episode of the Dear Patriarchy series we get into conversation with Queer Nature founders Pınar Ateş Sinopoulos-Lloyd and Sophia ("So") Sinopoulos-Lloyd. Queer Nature is a Colorado-based project that creates a decolonially-informed queer futurism through earth-based skills. Queer Nature envisions and implements ecological relationship as a vital and often overlooked part of the healing and wholing of populations who have been systemically silenced and marginalized, such as the LGBTQ2+ population, and especially trans and queer people of color and two-spirit folks. Ecological literacy is deep relationship building with living and non-living earth systems through ancestral-futurist resilience skills including naturalist knowledge, so-called ‘survival’ skills, natural crafts, and local cultural/natural history.

+++Be sure to check out/sign up for Queer Natures upcoming queer scouting intensive Scoutcraft: Belonging as Resistance coming up July 19-21 2018 in Portland OR and also their Queer Mountain Quest, a partnership between Queer Nature & Rites of Passage Journeys which Pinar will be guiding for 13-18 year old youth and taking place near Seattle WA, August 12-25 2018. And hop onto queernature.org to find out information about all the upcoming Queer Nature participation opportunities. +++

Stay connected with Queer Nature AND learn about and sign up to participate in their upcoming workshops and journeys: 
www.queernature.org
IG: @queernature
FB: @queernature
Queer Mountain Quest: http://riteofpassagejourneys.org/wilderness-programs/ages-14-18/queer-mountain-quest

The Dear Patriarchy Podcast Series is hosted by Broken Boxes Podcast in collaboration with Indigenous Goddess Gang.  

Follow Indigenous Goddess Gang HERE: www.indigenousgoddessgang.com
Instagram @indigenousgoddessgang

Dear Patriarchy Ep.3 QUEER NATURE (BBP 74)

In this episode we speak to multi-disciplinary and social practice artist Patricia Vázquez Gómez. Patricia breaks down how she uses art as a tool for investigation and to create situations which uncover tensions between visibility and invisibility. She reflects on her relationships with various resistance movements in Mexico and how she strives to remain accountable as she walks into a movement or resistance situation as an artist, navigating the work and privilege of the role in artist as 'activist'. Patricia also touches on her relationship to her queer identity, indigenous sexuality, along with the the importance of artists ethics, political awareness, and how critical it is to be accountable to what is driving you as an artist.

Patricia Vázquez Gómez works and lives between Portland and Mexico City. Her practice includes a range of media, from painting and murals to video and socially engaged art projects, and it is deeply informed by her experiences working in the immigrant rights and other social justice movements in the US, and by the zapatismo and indigenous movements in Mexico, both in content and in the methodologies she uses.

Patricia’s work can be explored at http://cargocollective.com/patriciavg

"I think that when we are doing work about other people's trauma, we have to be very careful about how we are doing that... I don't think we should not do the work, but I think there are ways in which we can do this type of work that is responsible and sensitive. I also believe that there are no formulas for doing any kind of work in the most perfect or ethical way, all we have is our values and our sense of what's responsible and what's respectful." -Patricia Vázquez Gómez

Interview with Patricia Vázquez Gómez. Episode 75

Healing the Land, Healing my Body

Artist Talk with Cannupa Hanska Luger & Eva Mayhabal Davis
recorded live at Bronxartspace, Bronx, NY,  October 3, 2018

Introduction by Stephanie Lindquist

Organized by Cougar Vigil & Eva Mayhabal Davis

"We would like to acknowledge the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Lenape peoples on which we are learning, working and organizing today.

BronxArtSpace is pleased to present, HUMBLE, works from 15 artists from various tribal nations across the US. Their presence and success comes at a crucial moment–amongst the state of urgency in which cultural spaces find themselves to actively acknowledge and contextualize ideas and creation outside the supposed mainstream. With doors being knocked down for artists and curators of color, the soapbox for the complex spectrum of Native Art is here to amplify. "

Artist Talk with Cannupa Hanska Luger & Eva Mayhabal Davis

This episode of Broken Boxes Podcast presents a live stream recording by artists Christine Howard Sandoval and Cannupa Hanska Luger as they visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new exhibit: Art of Native America, The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection on October 7th, 2018. The two artists engaged in a live stream critique and shared the experience on social media as it was unfolding. Onsite at the Met the two artists were joined by the guest curators from the Nelson Atkins Museum Gaylord Torrence and Marjorie Alexander along with the Met's director of public programs Mari Robles. 

http://www.brokenboxespodcast.com/podcast/2018/10/22/episode-77-artists-christine-howard-sandoval-and-cannupa-hanska-luger-live-stream-at-the-metropolitan-museum-of-arts-new-exhibit-art-of-native-america-the-charles-and-valerie-diker-collection

A note from the producer about this episode:

Broken Boxes Podcast has had the immense privilege to interview over 70 artists over the past 3 years. As the producer and creator of Broken Boxes, this project has been so dear to my heart and I am truly humbled and grateful for all of the incredible people who have taken the time to be vulnerable and share their stories on the platform of this podcast. This episode will mark a 6 month break I will initiate in the project, so I can regroup and take time and space to gather more interviews, edit them, upgrade equipment and connect with more artists and movements in a way that feels authentic and respectful. On a personal note, as a mother of two young children, I have just began approaching ‘unschooling’ or kind of like life schooling, focusing on some really intense life choices, allowing my children to love learning and be able to navigate the world in a way which respects them, and this journey is radical, scary and my partner and I are really excited to focus on our children a bit more holistically, which seems to be quiet a strong way to walk the walk in caring for our future and how we hope it to perpetuate. For this episode I was going to make a collection from all of the interviews I have done to date, I began, and got to about episode 30, when I realized there is no clear way to edit down the content of each episode, each artist is speaking in such a long format, and unapologetic way, sharing such important and critical information, I just could not edit the episodes down into soundbites, and it was making me feel horrible to try. (If you need to catch up on all the past episodes, you can do so in the Archive section.) And so, I chose not to do that for this episode. For this episode, before I take a nice break in publishing work, stories, interviews, conversations on this platform, I am grateful to share with you a pretty special recording of a live feed from earlier this month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I felt sharing this live feed broadcast would be a wonderful segway into the more in depth concentrated content I hope to begin intercepting into this project. I hope to find a way to follow more closely with a project or approach an artist is examining and present a more journalistic approach to the story and concepts. This will take time and travel and equipment upgrades. And so this break will allow me space to find these tools and refresh this work. I do feel this project is critical, it is an archive of existence, but this project breaks the colonial lens which the stories of my peers are often times focused through. And so I would like to continue it, but I would like to step it up many notches. 

Gratitude and solidarity!

Artists Christine Howard Sandoval and Cannupa Hanska Luger live stream at the Met. Episode 77

Visual Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger chats with Floyd Hall about his arts practice, including the notion of trust, his recent public art projects and how he approaches social collaboration. This conversation was recorded in advance of Luger’s Flux Exchange public talk at Atlanta Contemporary on November 3, 2018.

FLUX EXCHANGE - Cannupa Hanksa Luger

https://www.sttlmnt.org/projects/emily-johnson

Presented here is a rebroadcast of a responsive witnessing event produced through the STTLMNT Digital Occupation project. This is a conversation between Karyn Recollet, Emily Johnson, Joseph M. Pierce and Camille Georgeson-Usher. You are invited to first Watch the recording of the filmed performance, The Ways We Love and The Ways We Love Better, Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s), Emily Johnson's Collaboration with Jeffrey Gibson, presented at Socrates Sculpture Park, NY, September 16, 2020, and which this Responsive Witnessing conversation is in relationship with. Visit www.sttlmnt.org/projects/emily-johnson to view the performance and learn more about the artists featured in this conversation and the work of STTLMNT.


WATCH Emily Johnson's Collaboration with Jeffrey Gibson at Socrates "The Ways We Love and The Ways We Love Better, Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s)": youtu.be/nJAmqdMnFCk

Responsive Witnessing:  Emily Johnson, Karyn Recollet, Joseph M. Pierce & Camille Usher

Artist-run independent broadcasting platform amplifying narratives of intersection, solidarity, contradiction and inspiration in the Arts.

Launched in 2014, Broken Boxes was created to transmit ideas between working Artists. Broken Boxes shares the lived experiences and world building strategies of contemporary Artists in order to archive collective strength while considering how Art and imagining may unbind us from collective social trauma. This long-form interview podcast reflects the vulnerability and strength of the Artist while acknowledging the many variations of an Artists practiced values including those of the activist, advocate, disruptor or culture bearer. 

Broken Boxes maintains that complexity is resilience and expands on the points where we stand in accomplice-ship for one another as creatives. By actively practicing long term alliance through communication strategy, this work amplifies Artists at the forefront of global and regional impact who are creating new ways to see our existence through Art, organizing and advocacy. This project promotes deeper understanding, healing and solidarity as we move collectively towards witnessing each other and the world in new ways.

Interview with composer and artist Raven Chacon. Episode 56

Broken Boxes Podcast

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